The New Great Game

How Regional Powers are Carving Up Syria

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ANDREW J. TABLER is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle With Syria. Follow him on Twitter @Andrewtabler.

Just two weeks ago, the first 54 graduates of Washington’s trumpeted program to train and equip the Syrian opposition crossed from Turkey into Syria. They were immediately attacked by al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, which killed and captured a number of the trainees. The media and Congress rightfully focused on the inauspicious start to a program conceived well over a year ago, but lost in the shuffle was the fact that the unit’s commander is a Syrian Turkmen—an ethnic Turk with Syrian citizenship—and that the area through which the unit marched into Syria, the same territory that Turkey now proposes as a safe zone, is dominated by the very same sect.

Bassam Khabieh / Reuters

Rebel fighters take part in a military display as part of a graduation ceremony at a camp in eastern al-Ghouta, near Damascus, July 12, 2015.

Turkey is hardly alone in efforts to carve out friendly zones in the mayhem of the Syrian war. For over two years, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is based southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, has worked with its own local affiliate to establish Rojava, the Western province of Kurdistan. Jordan, whose intelligence services have been active in southern Syria for years, has been reaching out to local fighters and tribesmen in a bid to keep the Islamic State (also called ISIS) at bay. And some in Israel are considering working with Syria’s Druze community, parts of which straddle the Golan frontier. On a regional level, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also supporting groups in both northern and southern Syria, and Iran is sending record numbers of Hezbollah and Shia militiamen and billions of dollars annually to assist the Bashar al-Assad regime in western Syria.

As most of the world has stood by and watched Syria’s disintegration, regional powers have been busy claiming spheres of influence in the country in the name of security and humanitarian assistance. Bit by bit, Syria’s neighbors are redrawing that county’s map, the